Yet I think there is another reason for our skittishness with the gospel's truth claims, that is probably more important and is moreover perennial. So soon as we pose the question, "What indeed if it were true?" about an ordinary proposition of the faith, consequences begin to show themselves that go beyond anything we dare to believe, that upset our whole basket of assured convictions, and we are frightened of that. The most Sunday-school-platitudinous of Christian claims--say, "Jesus loves me"--contains cognitive explosives we fear will indeed blow our minds; it commits us to what have been called revisionary metaphysics, and on a massive scale. That, I think, is the main reason we prefer not to start [with the question "What indeed if it were true?"] and have preferred it especially in the period of modernity. For Western modernity's defining passion has been for the use of knowledge to control, and that is the very point where the knowledge of faith threatens us.
Simply put, the truth claims made by the gospel are not mere "facts." The simplest truth claims of the gospel, claims as rudimentary as "Jesus loves me," have revolutionary import. The gospel is a "cognitive explosion."
More, this knowledge isn't something that we can put to use. For that is how science has trained us to view knowledge, as a tool, a commodity, as a lever of power. The truths of the gospel, by contrast, cannot be so easily manipulated or made amenable to our desires. Quite the opposite. The gospel makes demands of us. And those demands create, quite understandably, resistance. What is being rejected in the gospel isn't simply "the truth," but the explosive and revolutionary implications of this truth.
BTW, Jesus loves you.
